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But what is the difference between journey mapping and journey analytics, and how can they be leveraged effectively to drive optimal results? Get all the details in this informative, complimentary eBook. You'll learn:

What customer journey mapping is and its benefits and pitfalls

5 key differences between journey mapping and journey analytics

How to use journey mapping and journey analytics together for maximum impact

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: this short book provides information to make sense of a new kind of tool that marketers should add to their arsenal: customer journey analytics platforms.

To assess the state of the customer journey analytics platform market and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top customer journey analytics platform vendors, divided into two categories and therefore two Forrester Wave™ evaluations. The criteria for the two evaluations are similar, but: 1) the weightings are different to reflect whether the end user's priority is journey visioning or journey orchestration, and 2) the journey automation and orchestration criteria appear only in the journey orchestration Forrester Wave. This Forrester Wave focuses on visioning. You can find its companion evaluation, focused on orchestration, here: The Forrester Wave™: Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q4 2018.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS : this is a new category of products that I was unaware of before now. With the importance of customer centricity in the digital transformation, I expect these tools to be very useful in large organizations.

Companies transforming to become customer-obsessed are using journey analytics to help them become customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected. Forrester defines journey analytics as:"An analytics practice that combines quantitative and qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior."

By using data to look at high-level journeys and to zoom in on microjourneys and the defining moments within them, journey analytics helps companies isolate, quantify, model, and track opportunities to improve CX, operational efficiency, and business results. Journey analytics stitches together data horizontally, across silos, to provide an integrated view of the customer and enable companies to test a wide variety of journey hypotheses in near real time to determine which combinations of interactions will yield the desired business results.

Journey analytics involves four core capabilities, and we have segmented the space into two categories:

Journey visioning, which focuses on data fusion, journey design and planning, and journey testing and optimization.

Journey orchestration, which includes the journey visioning capabilities but also delivers — and places a greater emphasis on — journey automation and orchestration.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS : this is a new category of products that I was unaware of before now. With the importance of customer centricity in the digital transformation, I expect these tools to be very useful in large organizations.

This report from leading global research and advisory firm, Forrester, identifies the 12 most significant customer journey analytics platform providers today, and reveals how each measures up based on 26 different evaluation criteria, to help you make the right choice for your organization. You'll get a complete overview of the current customer journey analytics market, including:

A breakdown of each journey analytics provider’s offering, strengths, specialties, and customer base

Key criteria that helps leaders stand out from the pack

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS : this is a new category of products that I was unaware of before now. With the importance of customer centricity in the digital transformation, I expect these tools to be very useful in large organizations.

If you’re new to this, a “marketing stack” is the collection of software that a marketing team uses to ply their trade. The Stackies is a fun awards program at the MarTech conference where we invite marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their marketing stack in some conceptual way.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: learning from what best in class companies do is always good thing. This award from chiefmartech surfaces the best marketing technology "Stacks" - the list of technologies and solutions that marketing team at Cisco, IBM and others use to do their work - provides insights into the tools that companies leverage to do their work. And with over 6500 solutions in the marketing horizon, finding the "right" set of tools is so difficult that mapping yourself to what others are doing may be a good starting point!

The Marketing technology category is growing in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, our most concise view into the category was built in 2011. While companies have been added highlighting new entrants, the Lumascape inspired view has been used primarily to emphasize how complicated and fast growing the space is.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: anything that helps me make sense of the fast moving world of digital marketing is always a good thing. I refer to it here as a snapshot of 2016, wishing that a 2018 version was available...

This post explains why traditional marketing analytics tools can't deliver the results CMO’s demand and what you can do to overcome their limitations.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: it is true that analysis of marketing data is difficult and often requires advanced technical skills to string together the tools required to make sense of data. Interesting diagrams and explanations here.

What would the impact be on your business if you could improve the effectiveness of your advertising by 25%? This document outlines the different parts of a good advertising setup and provides advice on best practices.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: few marketing units measure the success of their advertising campaigns. This article describes what it takes to do so.

Next time you meet a marketer, ask them (or ask yourself if you have a marketing budget) the following question: As of today, what percent of your marketing budget have you spent so far this month and is your overall spend tracking above or below budget? More often than not you don’t get a straight answer. Because they do not know. The spend for different marketing channels is typically tracked in different tools or in different siloed reports. Nowhere is it added up every day.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: I see it in most organizations: marketing team is overwhelmed with data but very few manage to provide simple reporting to show how good (or bad) their efforts are. It should in fact be simple to produce the table highlighted here but it is not.

The digital commerce platform market continues to grow steadily. Gartner forecasts digital commerce platform revenue to reach CAGR of 15.5% through 2022. The Gartner digital commerce team has seen continued growth in the number of digital commerce platform inquiries.

We recently conducted a Gartner Research Circle survey composed of members whose organizations use digital commerce platforms (see the Evidence section for details). Organizations in manufacturing and natural resources represented the highest number of participants (26%), followed by retail, services, banking, insurance and government, which collectively represented 43%. The survey revealed the following take-aways:

Of participating members, an average of one-quarter of total revenue comes through digital commerce channels.

Note: Most participants work in organizations that sell to both B2B and B2C audiences.

Delivering the desired customer experience was cited as the most critical challenge for digital commerce. Consistency in serving customers across all sales channels and justifying IT spending based on current ROI were also highlighted as key barriers.

A majority (63%) considered digital commerce as a critical and natural progression to a digital business strategy.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: always good to use when you need to know where the market is going on eCommerce. Love the analysis. Always take the vendors and their position with a grain of salt.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has today (11 July) published a detailed update of her office’s investigation into the use of data analytics in political campaigns.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: read this very detailed report that explains how political parties have used the Facebook data to create personalized messages and influence the election that led to the Brexit. Fascinating. Also read my posts on the data you leave behind - the data exhaust - that enables the creation of your digital twin: http://fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin

In May 2017 the Information Commissioner announced a formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes. The investigation is one of the largest of its kind and is ongoing. This page will be updated as and when developments arise.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: this report from the ICO data privacy organization in the UK explains in their recent report how political parties and companies use your private data to create a digital twin profile to then target you during your Internet journeys with micro-targeted messages. Also read my post on the digital twin concept: http://fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin

The ecosystem of third-party partners is only getting more complex as technology proliferates: creative, media, digital, research, communications, management consulting firms, data partners and marketing/advertising technology vendors.With so much choice, CMOs worldwide outsource a good number of marketing services, according to Newbase’s January 2018 survey.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: digital transformation often requires new processes, skills and organisation chart. This chart explains what to keep in-house and what to outsource.

Marketing leaders must boost the scale, relevance and return on content marketing investments. To meet these needs, content marketing platform vendors are merging editorial planning, content sourcing and analysis capabilities. Use this research to find a CMP that drives efficiency and results.

- By 2020, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization. However, content — not data — will be the bottleneck and primary cause of failure.

- By 2021, the term "content marketing" will be defunct as all marketing content rises to high-quality expectations of attention-limited audiences.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: marketing departments are often first to embrace digital transformation. Because of that they are more mature than others towards the use of solutions that are specific for digital processes. Case in point: content management. The proliferation of social media platforms, blogs, websites, and other have created a nightmare for marketing resources when it comes time to create, manage, publics and measure the success of their content they publish. Solutions have appeared to help reduce that burden.

This is the final part 5 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as 2018 marches forward. A recent study by Resulticks found artificial intelligence to be the most over-hyped term in marketing today. And that was with stiff competition from the buzzword bingo of big data, omnichannel, real-time marketing, and personalization. But as I wrote earlier this year, the one thing that everybody forgets about Gartner’s hype curve is that, even with the wildly swinging ups-and-downs of hype, the underlying technology continues to advance.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: Marketing has been the first department hit by digital transformation starting in the mid 2000s. It is interesting to take a step back after 10-15 years to see how they've evolved - and maybe learn a thing or two for other teams that are starting to feel the pain of digital transformation: administration, human resources, operations, etc.

This is part 4 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. For the first half of the Internet revolution, “digital” meant the web. Email was there from the beginning too, but it’s never gotten much respect as a transformational medium. (Mostly, in my opinion, because the pain-to-pleasure ratio of email in people’s lives doesn’t feel like a net win — with a fistbump out to M.G. Sielger.). But then the Hyrda-like heads of digital touchpoints began to multiply.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: Marketing has been the first department hit by digital transformation starting in the mid 2000s. It is interesting to take a step back after 10-15 years to see how they've evolved - and maybe learn a thing or two for other teams that are starting to feel the pain of digital transformation: administration, human resources, operations, etc.

This is part 3 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. I have been writing about vertical competition in digital marketing for several years: how companies at different points along the pathway between the marketer and the customer exert power and extract value.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: Marketing has been the first department hit by digital transformation starting in the mid 2000s. It is interesting to take a step back after 10-15 years to see how they've evolved - and maybe learn a thing or two for other teams that are starting to feel the pain of digital transformation: administration, human resources, operations, etc.

This is part 2 of a five-part series, providing an update on the 5 Disruptions to Marketing as we head into 2018. The rise of citizen technologists — citizen developers, citizen integrators, citizen analysts, and so on — was largely enabled by two big movements in the software world: Cloud computing and Microservices & APIs.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: Marketing has been the first department hit by digital transformation starting in the mid 2000s. It is interesting to take a step back after 10-15 years to see how they've evolved - and maybe learn a thing or two for other teams that are starting to feel the pain of digital transformation: administration, human resources, operations, etc.

A series on 5 disruptions to marketing. I wanted to look beyond the typical kind of prediction posts that we are inundated with at holiday season to scope out the larger changes underway over the next 3-5 years: Digital transformation redefines “marketing” beyond the marketing department.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: Marketing has been the first department hit by digital transformation starting in the mid 2000s. It is interesting to take a step back after 10-15 years to see how they've evolved - and maybe learn a thing or two for other teams that are starting to feel the pain of digital transformation: administration, human resources, operations, etc.

2017 was the year where the marketer's role in e-commerce changed drastically and retail businesses (both pure-play and omni-channel retailers) had to come to terms with a new playing field that required them to disrupt their own strategy at every turn.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: marketing expertise relies more and more on technology: AI, big data, beacons, emails, etc. Will the marketing resources be able to change and gain the skills required to deliver? Change management is key.

NPS has been a great tool to evaluate a company's website "quality" as measured by its customer feedback. Moreover it provides global scores per industry so as to let you compare your performance to your peers. Here are the latest scores.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.